riceissa's Comments - Effective Altruism forum viewerhttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/
riceissa's Comments - Effective Altruism forum vieweren-usComment by riceissa on We should make academic knowledge easierhttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/fJrBHDMdba2s7jfmZ/we-should-make-academic-knowledge-easier#comment-NgfG3sP65Cukh28Yd
<html><head></head><body><p>I am hav­ing trou­ble in­ter­pret­ing state­ments like “it does not seem to be on any­one’s agenda” and “not some­thing that any­one has looked at sys­tem­at­i­cally”. Can you say more about where you have looked and what you have re­jected? (From the ti­tle of the post I ex­pected to see men­tions of <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kAgJJa3HLSZxsuSrf/arbital-postmortem">Ar­bital</a>, <a href="https://distill.pub/">Distill</a>, <a href="https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/">re­search debt</a>, the many ex­plana­tory pieces pub­lished on LessWrong and the EA Fo­rum, work by <a href="http://cognitivemedium.com/">Michael Niel­sen</a>, and <a href="https://metacademy.org/">Me­ta­cademy</a>, to name some pro­jects that I have seen men­tioned and dis­cussed by effec­tive al­tru­ists.)</p>
</body></html>riceissaNgfG3sP65Cukh28YdThu, 31 Jan 2019 04:53:42 +0000Comment by riceissa on "Taking AI Risk Seriously" – Thoughts by Critchhttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/7DhEnxBqP62jHmsAx/taking-ai-risk-seriously-thoughts-by-critch#comment-CgS7hKqzsfPrBRpA8
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<p>Even if you’re not in­ter­ested in ori­ent­ing your life around helping with x-risk – if you just want to not be <em>blind­sided</em> by rad­i­cal changes that may be coming</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p>We don’t know ex­actly what will hap­pen, but I ex­pect se­ri­ous changes of some sort over the next 10 years. Even if you aren’t com­mit­ting to sav­ing the world, I think it’s in your in­ter­est just to un­der­stand what is hap­pen­ing, so in a decade or two you aren’t com­pletely lost.</p>
<p>And even ‘un­der­stand­ing the situ­a­tion’ is com­pli­cated enough that I think you need to be able to quit your day-job and fo­cus full-time, in or­der to get ori­ented.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ray­mond, do you or An­drew Critch have any con­crete pos­si­bil­ities in mind for what “ori­ent­ing one’s life”/​“un­der­stand­ing the situ­a­tion” might look like from a non-al­tru­is­tic per­spec­tive? I’m in­ter­ested in hear­ing con­crete ideas for what one <em>might</em> do; the only sug­ges­tions I can re­call see­ing so far were men­tioned in the <a href="https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/paul-christiano-ai-alignment-solutions/">80,000 Hours pod­cast epi­sode with Paul Chris­ti­ano</a>, to save money and in­vest in cer­tain com­pa­nies. Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?</p>
<p>The way I am imag­in­ing it, a per­son think­ing about this from a non-al­tru­is­tic per­spec­tive would then think about the prob­lem for sev­eral years and would nar­row this list down (or add new things to it) and act on some sub­set of them (e.g. maybe they would think about which com­pa­nies to in­vest in and de­cide how much money to save, but to not im­ple­ment some other idea). Is this an ac­cu­rate un­der­stand­ing of your view?</p>
</body></html>riceissaCgS7hKqzsfPrBRpA8Mon, 19 Nov 2018 22:21:35 +0000Comment by riceissa on Burnout: What is it and how to Treat it.https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NDszJWMsdLCB4MNoy/burnout-what-is-it-and-how-to-treat-it#comment-YrdYmbH4Hc7uCP5uP
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<p>I’m not sure how novel that is, but I’ve never seen it before</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ben Hoff­man <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/improve-comments-by-tagging-claims/#Threaded_comments_enable_tagged_claims">dis­cussed this</a> back in De­cem­ber 2016 (his re­cent posts don’t do this though), and he seems to cite Ar­bital propo­si­tions as in­spira­tion.</p>
<p>I’m not sure if Eliz­a­beth got the idea from Ben or if Ben came up with the idea.</p>
</body></html>riceissaYrdYmbH4Hc7uCP5uPMon, 12 Nov 2018 03:20:57 +0000Comment by riceissa on What's Changing With the New Forum?https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/dMJ475rYzEaSvGDgP/what-s-changing-with-the-new-forum#comment-JzLXJb2zzzgafRH3k
<html><head></head><body><p>There is <a href="https://ea.greaterwrong.com/">https://​ea.greater­wrong.com/​</a>.</p>
<p>See also <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Pkk6LziSsCMi8TWzw/the-new-effective-altruism-forum-just-launched/comment/SMacE4GLWH6K92CYo">this com­ment</a> an­nounc­ing it.</p>
</body></html>riceissaJzLXJb2zzzgafRH3kMon, 12 Nov 2018 03:01:23 +0000Comment by riceissa on EA Grants applications are now openhttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/nstKfMKh36Xdjsezm/ea-grants-applications-are-now-open#comment-aq5Ak5WckTQn2CW5X
<p>I have two ques­tions:</p>
<ol><li><p>Is there a full list of grantees and re­spec­tive grant amounts for the refer­ral-based round?</p>
</li><li><p>Is there some sort of eval­u­a­tion pro­cess for funded pro­jects that have con­cluded? I am cu­ri­ous es­pe­cially about the out­comes of the pro­jects that were funded in the 2017 round (that have now had the money for about a year). This ques­tion was <a href="https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/org8QYG3gqgDK7St6/effective-altruism-grants-project-update#comment-byWxfk4rW5adn8HZZ">asked</a> about a year ago, but the de­tails seemed un­cer­tain at the time so I am re-ask­ing the ques­tion.</p>
</li></ol>riceissaaq5Ak5WckTQn2CW5XTue, 18 Sep 2018 04:54:48 +0000Comment by riceissa on Awesome Effective Altruism - a curated list of EA resourceshttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/5XumhBiJKjvn6XkqQ/awesome-effective-altruism-a-curated-list-of-ea-resources#comment-gTxvwHpSHidQ4hsBP
<p>Sheon Han’s repos­i­tory was <a href="https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome/pull/1235#issuecomment-373366503">made pri­vate</a>. There are more more dis­cus­sion threads <a href="https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;q=effective+altruism">here</a>.</p>riceissagTxvwHpSHidQ4hsBPSun, 26 Aug 2018 04:35:51 +0000Comment by riceissa on Donations List Website: tutorial and request for feedbackhttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/A7NWTjnWZPmjyLdtT/donations-list-website-tutorial-and-request-for-feedback#comment-ZRQMPZwmhLq4T2Qe8
<p>So far al­most all <a href="https://contractwork.vipulnaik.com/venue.php?venue=Donations+list+website">DLW work by me has been con­tract work paid by Vipul</a>, and my guess is it will stay like this for the fore­see­able fu­ture. We have not sought other sources of fund­ing, but are in­ter­ested in re­ceiv­ing fund­ing (for my on­go­ing work).</p>
<p>As men­tioned in the post, the in­tended au­di­ence is some­thing like “peo­ple who think about effec­tive giv­ing, flow of money in the non-profit world, real-world de­ci­sion mak­ing, and similar top­ics”. To give some ex­am­ples:</p>
<ul><li><p>Ryan Carey has a <a href="https://github.com/RyanCarey/openphil">GitHub repos­i­tory</a> with data anal­y­sis of Open Phil’s grants data. (Last up­dated 2018-02-11.)</p></li><li><p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/GiveWellCommunity/permalink/546332045721614/">Here</a> is an­other ex­am­ple, but part of a closed Face­book group so I won’t de­scribe it. (Prob­a­bly last up­dated around 2018-01-14.)</p></li><li><p>Michael Dick­ens wrote a post en­ti­tled <a href="https://mdickens.me/2018/02/11/where_some_people_donated_in_2017/">“Where Some Peo­ple Donated in 2017”</a> record­ing where some EA and EA-periph­eral peo­ple donated. (Last up­dated 2018-02-14.)</p></li><li><p>In June 2017, there was a Face­book event called <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/314062745682718/">“What’s Up With the Open Philan­thropy Pro­ject?”</a> The event looked at some of Open Phil’s work, com­piling some <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/314062745682718/permalink/316334395455553/">doc­u­ments</a> about some of Open Phil’s grants in the pro­cess. Look­ing at the times­tamps, I think the Google Docs were cre­ated when the meetup be­gan, and were filled in dur­ing the course of the meetup. (Last up­dated 2017-06-09.)</p></li></ul>
<p>I think in all the above cases, ei­ther the cur­rent ver­sion of DLW or an im­proved ver­sion in the fu­ture performs a su­per­set of the data col­lec­tion/​anal­y­sis, is con­tinu­ally up­dated, and pro­vides a sin­gle lo­ca­tion for all the data and anal­y­sis.</p>
<p>Vipul has also made com­ments (<a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/jL7uDE5oH4HddYq4u/raemon-s-shortform-feed/comment/4qZ7n6rHpxyye398d">1</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/888997504752?comment_id=889142329522&amp;comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D">2</a>) and at least one <a href="https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10212973153219475">post</a> us­ing in part data col­lected by DLW, to make ob­ser­va­tions or an­swer peo­ple’s ques­tions.</p>riceissaZRQMPZwmhLq4T2Qe8Sat, 25 Aug 2018 02:07:44 +0000Comment by riceissa on Current Estimates for Likelihood of X-Risk?https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/frYYAAa5K4nHqRCPG/current-estimates-for-likelihood-of-x-risk#comment-xobj9qdnGRoQqjyRS
<p>An­ders Sand­berg’s Flickr ac­count has a 2014 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/14427926005/">photo</a> of a white­board from FHI con­tain­ing es­ti­mates for the fol­low­ing state­ments/​ques­tions:</p>
<ul><li><p>Prob­a­bil­ity that &gt;50% of hu­mans will die in a dis­aster in next 100 years</p></li><li><p>Are we liv­ing in a com­puter simu­la­tion cre­ated by some ad­vanced civ­i­liza­tion?</p></li><li><p>Your cre­dence that hu­man­ity goes ex­tinct in the next 100 years – re­plac­ing us with some­thing bet­ter (e.g. <a href="https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Whole_brain_emulation">WBE</a>) doesn’t count</p></li><li><p>Your cre­dence that AGI is de­vel­oped by 2050 (on Earth)</p></li></ul>
<p>The photo cap­tion is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Office guesses at (A) a dis­aster kil­ling 50%+ of hu­man­ity in the next cen­tury, (B) our re­al­ity turn­ing out to be a simu­la­tion, (C) ex­tinc­tion within a cen­tury, and (D) ar­tifi­cial gen­eral in­tel­li­gence be­fore 2050.</p>
<p>This is based on ear­lier Au­mann agree­ment ex­per­i­ments we did. Cre­dences are free to up­date as we see each other’s views, as well as get new ev­i­dence.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/15731404247/">two</a> <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/15497600040/">other</a> pho­tos show­ing parts of the same (or similar) white­board.</p>
<p>HT: Louis Franc­ini for origi­nally point­ing me to these pho­tos.</p>riceissaxobj9qdnGRoQqjyRSWed, 08 Aug 2018 05:42:11 +0000Comment by riceissa on In defence of epistemic modestyhttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/WKPd79PESRGZHQ5GY/in-defence-of-epistemic-modesty#comment-YBPd7iEmLd6A6HXyv
<p>To add to the list of refer­ences in this thread, Brian To­masik talks about this in “Gains from Trade through Com­pro­mise” in the sec­tion <a href="https://foundational-research.org/gains-from-trade-through-compromise/#Epistemic_prisoners_dilemma">“Epistemic pris­oner’s dilemma”</a>.</p>riceissaYBPd7iEmLd6A6HXyvFri, 29 Jun 2018 22:20:42 +0000Comment by riceissa on Announcing PriorityWiki: A Cause Prioritization Wikihttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/gFxgPhn3myvjo7NSo/announcing-prioritywiki-a-cause-prioritization-wiki#comment-es9EcF5gMAGHdoQ99
<p>(Con­text: I host the Cause Pri­ori­ti­za­tion Wiki.)</p>
<p>I think there might be a mi­s­un­der­stand­ing here, so I would like to clar­ify a cou­ple of things.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I also don’t want the fact that one per­son has done the pro­ject at one point to mean that no one can ever do the pro­ject again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I as­sume this is refer­ring to me, and that Peter is say­ing the Cause Pri­ori­ti­za­tion Wiki is dead. It’s true that the wiki was in­ac­tive for about two years, but more re­cently I’ve been adding more con­tent to it; there is an <a href="https://github.com/riceissa/causeprioritization/graphs/commit-activity">edit his­tory graph</a> show­ing ac­tivity for the past year.</p>
<p>But even as­sum­ing the wiki is dead, I’m not sure start­ing es­sen­tially from scratch is bet­ter than re­viv­ing the ex­ist­ing pro­ject.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We mainly chose to go with a differ­ent wiki soft­ware to im­prove the edit­ing ex­pe­rience (es­pe­cially edit­ing with­out cre­at­ing an ac­count) to re­move bar­ri­ers to con­tri­bu­tion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The choices of wiki soft­ware and of al­low­ing anony­mous ed­its are not un­change­able. For the former, I’ve ac­tu­ally been pon­der­ing for a while whether switch­ing to Me­di­aWiki would be a good idea (I haven’t looked into Wiki.js, which is what Pri­or­i­tyWiki uses), as I’ve got­ten more ex­pe­rience with edit­ing on Me­di­aWiki wikis since the time when I started the Cause Pri­ori­ti­za­tion Wiki. For the lat­ter, my think­ing has been that I don’t want to spend a lot of time mod­er­at­ing the wiki, which is why I chose to re­strict ac­count cre­ation and dis­able anony­mous ed­its. But if there is enough en­ergy to mod­er­ate the wiki, I would be fine with al­low­ing more open edit­ing.</p>
<p>Some thoughts I had about com­pe­ti­tion while think­ing about this situ­a­tion (I haven’t spent a lot of time think­ing about this topic):</p>
<ul><li><p>In gen­eral I think com­pe­ti­tion benefits end users.</p></li><li><p>There are four ex­ist­ing wikis about bit­coin that I know of, which might be an in­ter­est­ing case study:<ul><li><p><a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page">https://​en.bit­coin.it/​wiki/​Main_Page</a></p></li><li><p><a href="https://wiki.bitcoin.com/w/Main_Page">https://​wiki.bit­coin.com/​w/​Main_Page</a></p></li><li><p><a href="https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page">https://​en.bit­coin­wiki.org/​wiki/​Main_Page</a></p></li><li><p><a href="https://thebookofbitcoin.github.io/index.html">https://​the­bookofbit­coin.github.io/​in­dex.html</a></p></li></ul>
</p></li><li><p>With free soft­ware, fork­ing is of­ten difficult (ex­ist­ing code­base too com­pli­cated to un­der­stand, writ­ten for a differ­ent OS, writ­ten in a lan­guage that one is un­fa­mil­iar with) so there’s a pro­lifer­a­tion of similar ap­pli­ca­tions. This seems to be less of a prob­lem for prose.</p></li><li><p>Again with free soft­ware, differ­ent soft­ware pro­jects fo­cus on differ­ent (some­times in­com­pat­i­ble) things, like speed, fea­ture-rich­ness, mem­ory use, porta­bil­ity. With a wiki, there is still some of that (one can trade off along for­mal vs in­for­mal lan­guage, back­ground knowl­edge as­sumed, au­di­ence’s goals) but I think it’s less strong.</p></li><li><p>Again for soft­ware, there is also the is­sue of get­ting stuck in lo­cal op­tima (think how hor­rible LaTeX is but peo­ple are forced to use it). I think Wikipe­dia is similarly a lo­cal op­ti­mum for a generic en­cy­clo­pe­dia, but this seems mostly prob­le­matic be­cause of its dele­tion­ism.</p></li><li><p>For prod­ucts that are sold there is also com­pe­ti­tion along price.</p></li><li><p>For text­books, I think it’s good that there are a bunch of them for each (topic, level) com­bi­na­tion, be­cause ex­po­si­tion style/​difficulty can vary sig­nifi­cantly. I think for gen­eral refer­ence works there is a lot less of that, and even less for in­clu­sion­ist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia">elec­tronic</a> wikis.</p></li></ul>riceissaes9EcF5gMAGHdoQ99Wed, 20 Jun 2018 06:22:12 +0000Comment by riceissa on Which five books would you recommend to an 18 year old?https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/qMGFf8u32no9HtEhc/which-five-books-would-you-recommend-to-an-18-year-old#comment-sAvLc73hTnSJdA5vP
<p>Re top MIRI donors, there is a <a href="https://intelligence.org/2014/04/02/2013-in-review-fundraising/">2013 in re­view post</a> that talks about a sur­vey of “(nearly) ev­ery donor who gave more than $3,000 in 2013” with four out of ap­prox­i­mately 35 com­ing into con­tact via HPMoR. (Not to im­ply that this is the sur­vey men­tioned above, as sev­eral de­tails differ.)</p>riceissasAvLc73hTnSJdA5vPWed, 13 Sep 2017 17:39:32 +0000Comment by riceissa on Announcing Effective Altruism Grantshttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/wYaSxg4uGFLz4kJ6d/announcing-effective-altruism-grants#comment-Cc96zLLp4orHyoZfs
<p>How does this com­pare to EA Ven­tures?</p>riceissaCc96zLLp4orHyoZfsSun, 11 Jun 2017 02:38:30 +0000Comment by riceissa on Tell us how to improve the forumhttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/WSdkQknttrzcSb3Kh/tell-us-how-to-improve-the-forum#comment-qy2EgNooEzi5xrHqe
<p>I would find HTTPS sup­port use­ful.</p>riceissaqy2EgNooEzi5xrHqeWed, 04 Jan 2017 05:32:42 +0000Comment by riceissa on June 2016 GiveWell board meetinghttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/xuQ4dCHBtRXFZG487/june-2016-givewell-board-meeting#comment-FB8b67APJtr3JNaLo
<p>I am fine with this plan. Feel free to re­ply here or mes­sage me di­rectly if you run into difficul­ties or have any fur­ther ques­tions.</p>riceissaFB8b67APJtr3JNaLoSun, 21 Aug 2016 20:26:00 +0000Comment by riceissa on June 2016 GiveWell board meetinghttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/xuQ4dCHBtRXFZG487/june-2016-givewell-board-meeting#comment-r6SoiEiwGRX5butmc
<p>Hi Ben, thanks for the sug­ges­tion. I would be fine with mov­ing the ac­tive work to the EA Wiki, but I see two challenges: (1) the EA Wiki uses Me­di­aWiki markup in­stead of Mark­down; (2) the EA Wiki tends to use CC BY-SA in­stead of CC BY-NC-SA as its li­cense, so GiveWell’s origi­nal li­cense would need to ex­plic­itly be main­tained.</p>riceissar6SoiEiwGRX5butmcSun, 21 Aug 2016 06:39:45 +0000Comment by riceissa on June 2016 GiveWell board meetinghttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/xuQ4dCHBtRXFZG487/june-2016-givewell-board-meeting#comment-KDi7hJ7dhSvr278nJ
<p>Thanks for the feed­back, Michael.</p>
<p>I worked on this post un­der a fairly tight time con­straint, so I was not able to clean it up in all the ways I would have liked to (in­clud­ing us­ing full sen­tences, as you men­tion). There was also the con­cern that the post would be mostly ig­nored, caus­ing my ex­tra efforts to be wasted. Since this type of post seems to have gen­er­ated a fair amount of in­ter­est, I would be will­ing to push for do­ing a cleaner job in the fu­ture.</p>
<p>Also, the source Mark­down file for this post is <a href="https://github.com/riceissa/issarice.com/blob/master/wiki/june-2016-givewell-board-meeting.md">available on GitHub</a>, and, with the fairly per­mis­sive li­cense, it would be pos­si­ble for some­one else to come along and fix things (or fund some­one to do so); I would be happy to up­date this post to in­cor­po­rate any sig­nifi­cant im­prove­ments.</p>riceissaKDi7hJ7dhSvr278nJFri, 19 Aug 2016 02:24:55 +0000Comment by riceissa on Looking for Wikipedia article writers (topics include many of interest to effective altruists)https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/yBwTcKHWv9Lgunhrm/looking-for-wikipedia-article-writers-topics-include-many-of#comment-h8Bmf5QFWS9X8kqok
<p>This is Issa Rice, one of the paid writ­ers men­tioned in this post. In ad­di­tion to writ­ing pages, I also provide feed­back to some of the other paid writ­ers on pages they are cre­at­ing.</p>
<p>Work­ing with Vipul has been a gen­er­ally pos­i­tive and en­joy­able ex­pe­rience. He has deep knowl­edge of both the work­ings of Wikipe­dia as well as the top­ics on which he wants pages cre­ated (al­though this might be less true for some of the newer top­ics in this post). Prior to work­ing for Vipul, I had vir­tu­ally no ex­pe­rience edit­ing Wikipe­dia pages. Vipul walked me through the ba­sics (like mak­ing sure to cre­ate pages un­der one’s user space, hav­ing enough cita­tions, cer­tain other rules for Wikipe­dia edit­ing, and so forth—things that are not ob­vi­ous for a new Wikipe­dia ed­i­tor) so that I was soon able to be­gin cre­at­ing pages. For each new topic I worked on (tax­a­tion, im­mi­gra­tion, global health), Vipul has been will­ing to guide me through the ba­sics, help find use­ful sources, and re­view the page be­fore pub­li­ca­tion.</p>
<p>As some­one who cares about his al­tru­is­tic out­put and im­pact on the world, I’m still un­cer­tain about the over­all im­pact of writ­ing for Wikipe­dia rel­a­tive to other things I could be work­ing on, but I think of work­ing for Vipul as a fairly unique op­por­tu­nity to gain ex­pe­rience and ex­per­tise on top­ics while get­ting paid.</p>riceissah8Bmf5QFWS9X8kqokSun, 17 Apr 2016 05:37:31 +0000Comment by riceissa on An update on the Global Priorities Projecthttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/zujSYZBSWSHoaTxxp/an-update-on-the-global-priorities-project#comment-fefxSeazmwfwey3bA
<blockquote>
<p>look­ing at which work gets most views on our website</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How many page views has GPP been get­ting (for var­i­ous pages), and how do you fac­tor page views into your think­ing, speci­fi­cally?</p>riceissafefxSeazmwfwey3bAWed, 07 Oct 2015 23:48:45 +0000Comment by riceissa on EA Blogging Carnival: My Cause Selectionhttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/7Rn5HyvbHPJawapaR/ea-blogging-carnival-my-cause-selection#comment-CAX8GxixgNuHbmQBS
<p>There is some <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/CausePrioritization/permalink/845851595529401/">rele­vant dis­cus­sion</a> on the Cause Pri­ori­ti­za­tion Dis­cus­sion Group. </p>riceissaCAX8GxixgNuHbmQBSSun, 16 Aug 2015 01:12:59 +0000Comment by riceissa on Direct Funding Between EAs - Moral Economicshttps://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/BXFCXfH5EtKedoquu/direct-funding-between-eas-moral-economics#comment-FjGKKzHBdybj6gmTr
<blockquote>
<p>If you are hired by an EA in­sti­tu­tion to do a par­tic­u­lar set of tasks, you are be­ing paid to do those tasks, and help that or­ga­ni­za­tion do well in its func­tion. If you are di­rectly be­ing paid to be an EA how­ever, this is much more in­grained in your iden­tity. There are peo­ple pay­ing you to do the most good you can do. If you see an op­por­tu­nity for do­ing good, you will be more likely to take it, since you are never done with the obli­ga­tion of be­ing a great EA.</p>
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<p>While I agree that fund­ing in­di­vi­d­u­als is promis­ing, I don’t find this par­tic­u­lar ar­gu­ment very con­vinc­ing. If one is not be­ing paid to do par­tic­u­lar tasks, then “be­ing paid to be an EA” is a lot like be­ing paid to be cool, which prob­a­bly only works if one has already demon­strated the abil­ity to perform well un­der similar con­di­tions. Say­ing that peo­ple are pay­ing one to “do the most good one can do” sounds a lot like a ra­tio­nal­iza­tion where the whims of the donee are gra­tu­itously tol­er­ated.</p>
<p>Also I’d point out that con­stantly think­ing of EA as an obli­ga­tion and “never be­ing done” <a href="http://www.benkuhn.net/stress">may be sub­op­ti­mal</a>.</p>riceissaFjGKKzHBdybj6gmTrWed, 29 Jul 2015 09:45:50 +0000